Category Archives: Arsenal Analysis

The US Senate passed a bill last Thursday, which would overhaul No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, by a strong bipartisan vote of 81-17. Only three Democratic Senators voted against passage of the Senate’s version of the bill: Elizabeth Warren (MA), Chris Murphy (CT), and Cory Booker (NJ).

These three Senators, along with Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), had with broad Democratic support unsuccessfully introduced an amendment to the bill, called the “Murphy Amendment.” The amendment had called for states to identify schools that required intervention: the lowest performing 5% of schools in the state; high schools where less than 2/3 of students graduate on time; and any school where poor, disabled, or English language learner (ELL) students do not meet state-set goals for two consecutive years.

States would then be required to set-up an intervention strategy to better support those schools. Unlike the original NCLB legislation, under-performing schools would not lose funding, but would receive extra support to create a long-term plan to improve education outcomes.

All but three Democratic Senators voted in favor of the Murphy Amendment. The exceptions were Florida’s Bill Nelson (who did not vote), New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, and Montana’s Jon Tester. The only member of the Republican majority to join them was Rob Portman of Ohio.

Supporters of the amendment (including the President) believed that this amendment would have allowed the education reform bill to also serve as a civil rights bill, forcing each state to live up to its responsibilities to all of its citizens. A press release from Senator Murphy’s office notes the support the amendment received from civil rights advocates:

“While many educators hail the Senate bill as an improvement over the current federal education system, a coalition of 36 civil rights organizations are concerned there won’t be enough accountability, and that failing minority and disabled students will fall through the cracks.”

Accountability is a key term in the debate over education reform. Senator Booker says the reforms which passed in the Senate do not, “provide meaningful accountability measures that address the disparate achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color.” Without appropriate safeguards to identify and serve the states’ failing students and schools, there will be no way to tell if the bill is effective or fair.

The amendment’s opponents claim that the amendment would retain NCLB’s emphasis on testing, since states would be required to use test scores in their formula to determine failing schools. However, the amendment would give more power to the states to use other measures in their formula as well, such as high school graduation rates.

“In many ways, this bill represents a significant improvement from No Child Left Behind, moving away from rigid standardized tests and respecting the vital work that our teachers do every day–and I strongly support those changes. But this bill is also about money, and it eliminates basic, fundamental safeguards to ensure that federal dollars are actually used to improve both schools and educational outcomes for those students who are often ignored.”

The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House will now have to work to merge the House version and the Senate version into a bill that President Obama will sign. The call to make this a sweeping civil rights bill and the need to ensure that bill brings improvement to our nation’s education system are themes that are sure to echo throughout DC and around the country in coming weeks.

Warren, Booker, and Murphy have probably foreshadowed much of the debate ahead, as each legislator lobbies for their vision of education in America in the ultimate version of the legislation.

Last week, on Monday, July 13th, President Obama announced that he would commute the sentence of 46 Federal prisoners, non-violent drug offenders who he believed were serving punishments disproportionate to their crime.

Obama’s decision is not a singular event, but part of a series of events throughout his presidency aimed at bringing awareness to some of the broken parts of the American criminal justice system.

Since taking office, Obama has commuted 89 men and women serving time, 76 of whom were nonviolent drug offenders.

On Tuesday, July 14th, President Obama addressed the NAACP on the need for reform in our criminal justice system.

The Marshall Project notes, “no sitting president has ever publicly spoken at such length and in such detail as Obama now has about the persistent problems of crime and punishment in this country.”

Obama’s no-holds-barred speech touched upon everything from the over-sentencing of non-violent drug offenders to racial injustices in the criminal justice system to the school-to-prison pipeline to the detriments of solitary confinement.

He offered specific and necessary reforms to improve our criminal justice system, such as lowering or eliminating mandatory minimums and addressing crime prevention at the community level. (Check out more details here.)

Obama’s recent push to call attention to the failings of our justice system may just be working.

While there is still a wide divide between philosophies on justice and a general overuse of rhetoric which calls for politicians to be “tough on crime”, there is currently bipartisan support for bills in the House of Representatives and the Senate which would reduce the number of low-level drug offenders in prison by reforming prison sentencing and creating pathways for early release.

During his speech to the NAACP, Obama made an impassioned plea that all Americans should pay attention to if they desire to make common sense changes to make our criminal justice system more fair and effective.

“While the people in our prisons have made some mistakes, and sometimes big mistakes, they are also Americans. And we have to make sure that as they do their time, and pay back their debt to society, that we are increasing the possibility that they can turn their lives around.”

This week the Pentagon says that earlier this month it killed Muhsin Al-Fadhli, the leader of the (purportedly real) “Khorasan Group” — alleged to be a Syrian-based outpost of al-Qaeda’s central command — in an airstrike in Syria.

There’s a big problem, though. This is at least the THIRD time, the United States has supposedly killed Muhsin Al-Fadhli in an airstrike in Syria. An International Business Times article from September 28, 2014 reported that he had just been killed by a U.S. airstrike in Syria, but also that he had been previously reported to have been killed by a U.S. airstrike in Syria.

Possibly the bigger problem, though, is that it’s still unclear the group he supposedly leads actually … exists.

Let’s look back at the puzzling framing of other articles from September 2014 about U.S. airstrikes in Syria targeting the group.

American officials said that the group called Khorasan had emerged in the past year […]

There is almost no public information about the Khorasan group, which was described by several intelligence, law enforcement and military officials as being made up of Qaeda operatives from across the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Members of the cell are said to be particularly interested in devising terror plots using concealed explosives. It is unclear who, besides Mr. Fadhli, is part of the Khorasan group.
[…]
Ayman al-Zawahri, the head of Al Qaeda, anointed the Nusra Front as its official branch in Syria and cut ties with the Islamic State early this year after it refused to follow his orders to fight only in Iraq. Officials said that Khorasan was an offshoot of the Nusra Front.

In addition to a broader campaign of airstrikes against Islamic State targets across Syria on Monday night, the United States also pounded a little-known, but well-resourced al-Qaeda cell that some American officials fear could pose a direct threat to the United States.

The Pentagon said in a statement early Tuesday morning that U.S. warplanes conducted eight strikes west of Aleppo against the cell, called the Khorasan Group, targeting its “training camps, an explosives and munitions production facility, a communications building and command and control facilities.”﻿

“I knew about the group a year ago from the media but didn’t know the name or personalities until the past few days — again from the media,” said Will McCants, a terrorism analyst and fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Most of the other experts quoted either instinctively suggested this group is a huge threat (because of course they do) or said it’s borderline made-up.﻿

Then, on November 14, 2014, the LA Times reported more airstrikes — officially undertaken against “Khorasan,” but which seemed to hit an awful lot of major Nusra Front facilities. And one big issue leapt out:

Many opposition activists in Syria and elsewhere doubt the existence of Khorasan, contending that the targets being attacked are actually Al Nusra Front strongholds. Last week, as Centcom announced the second round of strikes on Khorasan positions, opposition activists said warplanes had hit the headquarters of Al Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham, another hard-line rebel group with Al Qaeda links.

To recap all of this: The purported organization only came into public knowledge hours before it was first attacked by the U.S. military in September, and locals say it does not exist and is solely a made-up front for unofficially targeting the popular and very real and very large Nusra Front of al-Qaeda in Syria, while suggesting some sort of distinction between the internationalist and Syria-facing segments of Qaeda’s presence in the country that isn’t really there.

And our leaders, public officials, and media outlets are — by and large — just rolling along with this fairly transparent and repeatedly invalidated fiction.

Back to this week’s news. Here’s a “interesting” assessment of the supposed assassination of the supposed group’s supposed leader:

“A seasoned, knowledgeable and dangerous terrorist who actively sought to harm the United States and its allies has been taken off the battlefield for good,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noting that al-Fadhli will not be easily replaced.

Except, I suppose, if he replaces himself with himself if he’s still not dead.

I’m always fascinated by the way language and available terminology shapes our worldview — literally causing us to view the world fundamentally differently from our fellow people if they grew up with a very different language. In international politics, these differences crop up from time to time in the news.

In recent years, after many decades of broad cultural-political integration, the differences and resulting gaps in mutual understanding have generally become smaller, even borderline mere curiosities.

But then there are the truly isolated holdouts, the places that have sealed themselves off from the outside world and kept their language from cross-pollinating.

According to a great new article in the New York Times, the dictatorship of Myanmar — still struggling under new management with a transition into democracy — has been one such place. The consequences of that linguistic-political isolation are now catching up as “Those Who Would Remake Myanmar Find That Words Fail Them”.

The Burmese language doesn’t yet have a native word for democracy, only the borrowed English word with an accented pronunciation. However, it turns out the problem is much larger than one missing word: The country lacks Burmese words for most of the new political and policy concepts of the past four decades (like “computer privacy”)…or even many old concepts like “institution” or “federalism.” The Myanmar military regime attempted to ban even English words for political ideas — and then corrupted the understood meaning of any that remained, such as “rule of law.” An estimated 10-50% of the meaning of any given conversation between Western diplomats and Myanmarese leadership is hopelessly lost in translation.﻿

And it may not just be a failure to understand the literal words. It’s hard to adopt and promote the ideas in a substantive way when the conceptual meaning behind them doesn’t carry over into the worldview-informing culture and language.

This, to my mind, should then pose a much bigger question, affecting many more countries in Asia as well as Africa — and one vastly beyond my pay grade:

Has the West been too quick to fault democratic shortcomings and state failures in post-colonial developing nations as a whole, if we accept that these Western Enlightenment-derived concepts from philosophers and leaders speaking inter-entangled European languages might have to some degree been imposed onto existing cultures with poorly compatible linguistic-cultural frameworks?

Obviously there would still be the usual factors sharing the blame. But it might play a role.

The Burmese political translation challenges now playing out in public should also, once again, raise legitimate questions about the very premise of “universal” values.

After the recent callous murder of 30 British tourists in the holiday resort of Sousse in Tunisia and the earlier attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, some in the Tunisian security establishment are propelling a new narrative in friendly media (with assistance from willing critics in France and beyond).

According to this new chain of responsibility, it has become much harder in Tunisia to protect the country – and tourists – against the infiltration of terrorists from Libya (partially true — training for both attacks happened there), and that this makes whatever happens ultimately the UK’s fault (not true).

The implication is that the UK and other overly hasty, zealous and/or optimistic Western supporters of the 2011 intervention in Libya now share some responsibility for that country’s plentiful troubles — and by extension Tunisia’s security problems and the deaths of their own citizens.

It sounds plausible, even gripping, at first glance. To be sure, Libya’s territory is now essentially lawless, with terrorists roaming freely and a three-way civil war. And Tunisia shares a long land border with Libya. Terrorists do indeed slip rather unimpeded across it into Tunisia.

But does that mean that countries such as the UK bear responsibility for the current struggles of neighboring Tunisia?

Remember cause and effect

That interpretation is not only a bit too convenient for Tunisia, but it also actually inverts some crucial timelines.

In terms of chronological cause-and-effect, some 1,000 Tunisian terrorists may be more responsible for Libyan instability than the other way around.

Certainly, Libya’s violent chaos does not make Tunisia more stable, but Tunisia is fundamentally grappling with a homegrown challenge. In essence, it is the echo effect of long decades of oppression under former ruler Ben-Ali that now leads to all sorts of contortions.

Mass unemployment, particularly among educated youth, remains a huge problem. The police, whose abuses sparked the initial uprising, remain an omnipresent antagonist. The state is flailing on how to guarantee free speech while stopping terrorist recruitment that capitalizes on these frustrations.

But such aggravations are not new and the recruitment is not new, nor is the Libyan war to blame.

Tunisia as a producer of terrorism in the region

Here is the upshot: A few Tunisian towns (PDF download) were contributing an astonishing number of jihadist fighters worldwide (in places like Iraq) before the Arab Spring occurred, let alone the NATO intervention in Libya – or the start of the jihad-magnet war in Syria for that matter.

Thousands of these experienced Tunisian fighters – since 2010 some 3,000 are believed to have “served” in Syria and Iraq, more than from anywhere else – are merely starting to “rotate” back home now. Tunisia already had loose borders with Libya, which makes it easy to get back in.

There are also the would-be global jihadists who are turning inward on Tunisian targets because the government has succeeded in making it (somewhat) harder to reach foreign battlefields like Syria, which is still the primary goal location.

Tunisia’s recent terrorist attack that claimed so many British lives is one of the few recent incidents in the Middle East-North Africa region for which the UK bears little direct responsibility.

The internal politics of Tunisia – and even the factors for the rise of terrorist recruitment – remain substantially different from the other Arab Spring states. It would be a mistake to lump Tunisia’s challenges in with the rest. An honest assessment will go further toward solving them than misleading blame games.

I’ve recently written here about two different topics, which are now becoming closely related.

First, I looked at how Denmark’s Social Democrats, who headed the government until last month, took a much harder line on immigration — in an unsuccessful attempt to hold off the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party on the far-right — ahead of the June 2015 election.

Second, I also looked at a UN report on how the government of Eritrea — a huge source-country of asylum-seeking immigrants to Europe — literally enslaves and murders its own people to try to prevent them from leaving the country’s brutal conditions. It is illegal to exit the country without permission (rarely granted), and the government reacts very harshly to its citizens all across the world if they manage to make it out anyway.

Now the new Danish government, headed by the center-right Venstre Party and supported by the Danish People’s Party, has adopted an appalling new policy to send Eritrean asylum-seekers back to Eritrea. This decision was made on the basis, according to the BBC, of a (widely criticized) report commissioned last fall … under the Social Democrat-led government … claiming it was now safe to send back Eritreans. Skimming over the report (English version), it’s clear how thinly sourced and dubious many of the claims are. By most sound accounts, anyone sent back will be executed or tortured and sentenced to decades of hard labor.

By the report’s own admission (p. 16), as of “a few years ago,”

[…] returning evaders and deserters were routinely subjected to severe punishment including torture and detention under severe conditions over a prolonged period of time. It was further added that those refusing or failing to participate in National Service would risk to lose a number of his or her citizen’s rights and, in exceptional cases risk indefinite incarceration or loss of life. Returning evaders or deserters that were known for political oppositional activities abroad upon return to Eritrea were taken to underground cells at a prison outside of Asmara while they were under investigation.

There has been no change in leadership in Eritrea since then. At the moment, 5,000 people are fleeing the country each month to seek asylum, in spite of shoot-to-kill border control orders.

The report’s suggestion that “the government’s attitude […] seems to be more relaxed” these days is essentially ludicrous. But Denmark’s new policy toward asylum-seekers from Eritrea is premised upon that claim.

This is a real-world consequence of center-left politicians triangulating to be “tough on immigration.” The Danish Social Democrats conveniently managed to lose the election just in time to not get the blame for the policy change, ostensibly undertaken by the anti-immigrant center-right coalition and its parliamentary bloc. But they laid all the groundwork for it: not only failing to defend desperate asylum-seekers and defenseless refugees to voters during the election campaign (instead adopting much of the anti-immigrant talking points and propaganda from the opposition), but literally also writing the fraudulent report that will now get people killed. Denmark’s Social Democrats will have blood on their hands from their pandering to anti-immigrant sentiments.

I don’t expect better from the Conservative governments in Britain and Norway, which issued similarly roundly attacked reports on how “safe” Eritrea now is, based on vague promises by the Eritrean dictatorship to do things differently in future. I do demand better from center-left parties.

U.S. Democrats, take note: Don’t make the same mistake here. Don’t triangulate on this issue. Don’t turn your back on people in need. Don’t sell out immigrants coming to this country for a better life and freedom from want and fear.

When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law in 2002, it was intended to last only until 2007, when lawmakers would revisit and improve the law. Instead, our country’s lawmakers allowed the bill to expire, forcing states to continue to abide by it until another law replaces it (or, after 2011, seek a conditional waiver from the Obama Administration).

Finally, with both sides of the aisle dissatisfied with NCLB, Congress has decided to take note of the lessons learned in the past 13 years and begin debates to replace the law. Meaningful changes in the law are far from a slam dunk; those on the left are calling for reforms as progressive as universal pre-kindergarten and those on the right wish to see more decision-making power reside in the states. If an agreement is to be struck, it will surely come at the end of impassioned and tumultuous debate.

The bill that has been brought to the Senate floor is sponsored by Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) — both of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, where the bill passed unanimously in April. The proposed bill calls for the continued use of mandated math and reading tests, but would allow states to decide what to do with their results. Furthermore, in direct response to the debate over Common Core, the bill would prohibit the federal government from requiring, or even encouraging, a nationwide set of academic standards.

The House of Representatives is set to debate their own version of the bill, sponsored by John Kline (R-MN), which includes giving states control over school accountability and a controversial school choice provision. This bill was set to be voted upon in February, but that vote was withdrawn because there was not enough support, even within the Republican majority, for it to pass — and the White House announced that it would be vetoed, should it reach the President.

Here’s a primer on some of the key issues set to unfold during the debate:

Veto Power. The White House has announced that it does not support either the House or Senate bills in their current form due to a lack of accountability. While they haven’t said that they would veto the Senate’s bill, they have made it clear that they hope to see improvements. Namely, they would like to see a plan for failing schools. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, pointed out, “To simply label a school as failing, that doesn’t change a kid’s life.”

It’s a civil rights issue. Although a school and its students are far more than a number, testing has allowed for a quantitative way to highlight the differences in quality of our country’s schools and has been particularly effective in bringing the black/white achievement gap out of the shadows. When the President and his Secretary of Education refer to accountability, they are, in many ways, referring to the federal government’s responsibility to figure out which of its citizens it is failing and fix it.

Testing, testing, and, oh wait, more testing. The country’s largest teacher’s union, The National Education Association, has long been calling for the elimination or severe reduction of standardized tests. Banking on a renewed anti-testing fervor stemming from frustration with the Common Core, their voice is sure to be heard in this debate. While testing is disruptive, wildly unpopular, and known to distract school systems from the true mission of educating children, another viable accountability option would have to be brought forward to see the elimination of testing. In the meantime, there’s a real chance the testing could be limited and the scores used in a different way.

Wish lists. It is impossible to overstate the importance of public education, and everyone wants to leave their mark on the issue. Bob Casey (D-PA) seeks to provide universal pre-kindergarten and believes he can fund it by closing a corporate loophole allowing US companies to move part of their business overseas in order to become foreign corporations for tax purposes. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) will ask for more detailed background checks of all school personnel. Other lawmakers are sure to add their opinions and addendums to the bill.

In the words of John F Kennedy, “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” Nothing short of the fate of our country rests upon the education we provide to its children. Let us insist that our lawmakers take this opportunity to make sound, effective, and significant improvements to our education system.

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-Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,December 29, 1940